From Publishers Weekly
Each novel by Doctorow is an entirely different experience, a journey of the imagination into hitherto uncharted territory. The Waterworks , set in the corrupt but hideously exciting New York of the decade following the Civil War, is the strangest such journey yet. The narrator, an elderly newspaperman named McIlvaine, recalls the bizarre events surrounding the disappearance of one of his paper's best freelance writers in 1871. Martin Pemberton was the son of Augustus Pemberton, a brutal, cunning man who had made a fortune as a war profiteer, then died, leaving his family mysteriously penniless. Martin was convinced he had seen his father alive, in a coach in the company of other old men; then Martin vanished. McIlvaine interests the municipal police, in the person of odd, incorruptible Captain Edmund Donne, and together they ferret out a weird scheme in which aging millionaires have paid the brilliant, cold-blooded Dr. Sartorius to preserve their lives in a state of suspended animation. The tale has the brightly lit intensity and surreality of a dream, heightened by McIlvaine's halting, amazed narration; and such is the power of Doctorow's imagination that the very city itself, its burgeoning modernity, its huge machines, its febrile citizenry, seems to become a major actor in the drama. World's Fair and Billy Bathgate were both given a human dimension by their child's-eye point of view. Here Doctorow is taking a larger risk by placing the reader at a much greater distance from the events and subduing his contemporary sensibility in favor of a wonderfully convincing 19th-century angle of vision. It is as if Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James had somehow combined their incompatible geniuses to bring this profoundly haunting fable to life.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Something's amiss with Martin Pemberton, renegade son of rich, unscrupulous Augustus Pemberton and favorite freelancer of the persevering editor of the New York Telegram, who narrates this tale. First, Martin claims to have seen his dead father on a horse-drawn omnibus, and then the son disappears. The worried editor contacts Inspector Edmund Donne-the only honest cop in 1870s New York, where the Tweed Ring holds sway-and eventually they discover that the ailing Augustus is part of an experiment by the brilliant Dr. Sartorius to prolong the lives of several old men rich enough to foot the bill. Cast as a mad scientist, Sartorius uses methods that prompt the narrator to mourn, "I was haunted...not by ghosts, but by Science....I imagined that it all might be initiatory, a kind of spiritual test in a world ruled by God after all." The twist, of course, is that Sartorius's methods are commonplace medical procedures today. Doctorow wants us to think about issues of mortality and morality, and indeed this piece works better as a philosophical treatise than a novel. The points are neatly made, the characters well etched, and the plot hums along nicely, but it doesn't quite come alive. It's not the best Doctorow, but most libraries will still want this.
--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
